Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...

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156 Observing the Landscape Roland Tusch University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Institute of Landscape Architecture, Peter Jordan Straße 82, 1190 Vienna, Austria (e-mail: roland.tusch@boku.ac.at) Abstract In the middle of the 19th century, it was one of the major challenges of the Industrialisation to overcome the Alps by train. In Austria, the turmoils of the March Revolution initialised the construction of the Semmering railway. New views of the romantic Semmering landscape became possible. The external view, as a view through the site tourists’ eyes, was characterized by looking from the valley up to the site. It shows the large-scale infrastructural project in the landscape leading through three valleys. The internal view, seen through the signalmen’s eyes, shows the railway worker and his house being dominated by the railway, the system that they are a part of. The view out of the compartment window turns the landscape into a motion picture. It separates the passenger from the surrounding landscape. The three different perspectives onto the landscape show that the interaction between the manmade infrastructural intervention and the landscape can be an aesthetic enrichment for a region. Together, the railway and the landscape formed the base for the development of the Semmering region. Key words Infrastructure and landscape, landscape perception, landscape change, railway Introduction At the beginning of the 19th century, the countryside can be characterised as a self-developing system without any influences from the outside. “This condition could be described as paradisiacal but with the snag – as usual in paradise – that those living in it cannot appreciate it.” (Achleitner 1997: 165) Due to the Industrialisation, man’s regard to his environment changed strongly. Small industries were the starting point of new human settlement in the countryside. The means of transportation of the Industrialisation was the railway, which launched the development of a number of today’s tourist regions in Austria. The changing situation through Industrialisation made the countryside appear to be paradisiacal on the verge of destruction. The construction of railway lines in the alpine region presented a major challenge. The landscape, marked through a rough topography, was not the ideal place for the new means of transportation. It was a challenge to overcome the Alps by train. One of these railway lines – over the Austrian Alps – was the Semmering railway. It was supposed to connect the royal seat of the Danube Monarchy, Vienna, with its most important seaport, Trieste. While the railway lines from Vienna to Gloggnitz (1842) as well as from Graz to Mürzzuschlag (1844) had already been finished, the connection over the Semmering, the last branch of the Alps, was still missing. The train journey from Vienna to Graz had to be adjourned and the Semmering had to be overcome via horse and cart. The towns of Schottwien and Mürzzuschlag became increasingly important for the region; they became locations for blacksmiths, horse and cart enterprises, and accommodation facilities. During the construction of the Semmering railway, Schottwien, where the site office of the railway construction was located, had a short upsurge. In spring 1848, Vienna was also shattered by the turmoils of the March Revolution, and the challenge was to provide a lot of people with work outside of the capital. While the planning work for a railway over the Semmering had long since been begun, it was, eventually, the Revolution that initialised the beginning of the railway construction across the mountain. The railway as an infrastructural element provided new opportunities in order to observe the landscape. Material and methods - three main materials Already during the construction period, especially the Viennese people were interested in the progress of the railway through the Semmering. Several weekend trips took place with the railway site as their destination. 1851, in the third year of the railway construction, Melchior Edlen von Schickh published his travel guide for the site tourism already in the second run. The guidebook is dedicated to those advocating progress. In the conclusion Edlen von Schickh describes that overcoming the Alps by railway and thereby connecting two seas, which were a long distance apart, is a grand progress in the history of mankind. Thereby, he sees the railway project in a meaningful, big scale context. Considering the available time of the tourists, the author suggests three different types of site trips. The first one takes an entire day, the second one night and one day, and the third one takes three days. Observing the rail track was the main task of one profession: the signalmen. Already in 1847, seven years before commissioning the Semmering railway, the southern national railway of the Danube Monarchy edited a small booklet named ”Instructionen für die Bahnwächter auf der k.k. südlichen Staats-Eisenbahn”. It is a precise description of the signalman’s job, which focuses on a lot of points the careful observation of the whole rail track.
157 Fig. 1: viaduct from the valley In the chosen example, more than 50 signalmen’s houses along the 41 km long track characterize the Semmering railway. The houses are in precise relation to the rail track as well as to the surrounding landscape itself. The instructions for the signalmen together with the signalmen’s houses show the significance of the specific signalmen’s view of the landscape. After finishing the Semmering railway till today, several travel guides appeared in print, describing the view of the landscape through the compartment window of the train or even of the locomotive. People from the entire society were fascinated by railways. Through the railways, the perception of landscape was popularized (Schivelbusch 2007: 186), everyone was able to afford to take the new point of view of the landscape. In accordance, there are different types of descriptions of the rail track. The one that is used as a base for this work was written by Peter Wegenstein in 1979. It was published in a book series dominated by pictures which is mainly concerned with Austrian railway lines. The text is not a scientific paper but it is a useful description of the track which refers several times to the surrounding landscape. This research is based on the three main materials mentioned above. Each material represents a different view of the landscape to show the complexity of the infrastructural landscape of the Semmering. In addition to the three selected texts, there are further major studies on the history of the railway journey by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, the research on the changing perception of space and landscape by Gerhard Strohmeier as well as the studies by Wolfgang Kos and Günter Dinhobl on the Semmering. Results and discussion The rail track and the landscape - the external view The railway changes the perception of scales and distances in the landscape. In 1851, Edlen von Schickh mentions the connection between two seas through the railway over the Semmering in the conclusion of his guidebook (Schickh 1851: 13). The Baltic and the Mediterranean Sea become connected. He sees the significance of the infrastructural project in shortening the distances between different regions of the continent. The increasing speed of transportation means makes us perceive distances becoming shorter. Nevertheless, it takes some time travelling through the landscape. Nowadays, transportation infrastructure is about straight lines connecting different destinations, thereby nearly ignoring the landscape. Passing through a tunnel or noise protection walls does not provide us with impressions of the landscape anymore. The landscape is hidden. On the Semmering railway, the destruction of space (cf. Strohmeier 2004: 178) through the increasing speed stands in opposition to the mountainous landscape, which was difficult to overcome. The challenge was to overcome the Alps and thereby, a whole region became accessible. For tourists who went to the site, the best looks of the mountains, like Rax, Schneeberg, Otter, Gansberg und Göstritz where pointed out in the guidebook. But at that time, it was only the view looking up from the valleys because the track on the slopes had not been finished yet [Fig. 1]. The significance of the horizon as a margin in the landscape (Strohmeier 2004: 185) became visible. The guidebook is structured according to the three valleys the train passes through: the Schwarzathal, the Adlitzthal and the Froschnitzthal. In descriptions which appeared after the railway had been built, these valleys were only mentioned in terms of the rivers, which have to be crossed by viaducts. The greater structure of the landscape, like Edlen von Schickh described it through the three valleys, has not been mentioned ever since. Even today, it is no easy to grasp the complexity of the Semmering landscape by passing through by train without knowing about the greater landscape structure. It was Carl Ritter von Ghega, the engineer of the rail track himself who said: “Indeed, I had to view the environment again and again in order to figure out the entire terrain.” (Ghega 1989: 16) And it is the viewpoints on the fare horizon that provided the engineers and the tourists from the middle of the 19th century with important points of orientation. The perspective from the valley up to the track let the viaducts and buildings appear more impressive than they appeared viewed from the track. The viewpoint from the valley seems to be programmatic for the relation between man, nature and technology progress and how it was seen at that time. The noticeable project shows the positive evaluation of the new constructions like viaducts, road cuts and dams, which become part of the modern perception of space and landscape. While in the guidebook for the site tourists, the buildings had not been named yet, it did not take long and all bridges and tunnels received names relating to places in the surrounding landscape. Papers
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